
U-2 Over Egypt: A Remote Survey of the Nile Delta using Cold War Aerial Photography
February 19 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
1606 Rowan Street
Louisville, KY 40203 United States
Sponsored by: AIA-Kentucky Society, University of Louisville
AIA Society: Kentucky

The KY Society of the AIA and the University of Louisville Department of Anthropology present a free public lecture by Dr. Oren Siegel (University of Toronto). During the height of the Cold War, the United States flew a series of reconnaissance missions using U-2 spy planes over Egypt. Film negatives from two flights that cover much of the Nile Valley and Nile Delta from 1959 have recently been declassified, and the resulting imagery is both earlier and higher resolution than publicly available CORONA satellite imagery. This talk will discuss the ongoing work by the Brown-Toronto U2 Aerial Photography of Egypt Project to digitize this imagery from the National Archives and Records Administration and make these photographs publicly available to all interested researchers. Beyond this, I will showcase the results of our ongoing remote survey of Beheira Governorate using U-2 imagery, highlighting how this imagery gives us a unique window onto a landscape that has changed significantly over the last 5 decades. The talk will close by looking at how this compares to other satellite imagery and aerial photography and highlight the potential of this dataset for archaeological research.


